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Facebook documents: "The company knew about incitement to violence in India - and did not act" - Walla! news

2021-10-26T06:25:37.895Z


U.S. media outlets released additional documents leaked by former employee Frances Haugen, which focused on the company's largest market. Facebook, it appears, was aware of the site's many hate speeches in early 2020 and did nothing against them. Dozens were killed in clashes between Hindus and Muslims at the time


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Facebook documents: "The company knew about the incitement to violence in India - and did not act"

U.S. media outlets released additional documents leaked by former employee Frances Haugen, which focused on the company's largest market. Facebook, it appears, was aware of the site's many hate speeches in early 2020 and did nothing against them. Dozens were killed in clashes between Hindus and Muslims at the time

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  • India

  • Facebook

  • Narendra Moody

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Monday, 25 October 2021, 21:54 Updated: 21:57

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(Photo: Reuters)

Facebook knew full well that expressions of hatred spreading on India's social network could exacerbate ethnic violence in the country, and it did not use its resources to curb the phenomenon, according to internal documents leaked by former company employee Frances Haugen and published over the weekend in US media.



"Facebook documents," as they are called, have already exposed the contribution of Facebook, as well as WhatsApp and Instagram, which it owns, to the deep political polarization in the United States and the impact on the mental health of teens.

In addition, Facebook has been linked in recent years to spreading hate speech that has prompted acts of violence in developing countries, such as the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.



Recent documents, published in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post, among others, have focused on the presence of Facebook WhatsApp in India, the American company's largest market in terms of number of users.

A report compiled by the company's own investigators in July 2020 showed that incitement to violence had skyrocketed since December 2019.



"Rumors and calls for violence spread especially on WhatsApp, Facebook's messaging service, in late February 2020," the Wall Street Journal reported.

At that time clashes between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority left dozens dead.

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In the video: A Facebook worker who leaked testifies in Congress (Photo: Reuters)

The Washington Post, which quoted an internal memo on Facebook, reported that the company had already created in February 2019 a fictitious account, of a 21-year-old woman from northern India, to better understand the user experience. The account followed posts, videos and accounts recommended by Facebook, but a company investigator found that he promoted a lot of fake content and agitation.



"I have seen more pictures of people dead in the last three weeks than I have seen in my entire life," read the 46-page report, which was one of the documents that leaked fairly. "In a short time, without any instruction from the user, the Facebook account was flooded with propaganda for Moody and anti-Muslim hate speech," the Washington Post wrote. The nationalist prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, then campaigned for re-election to the post.



At the same time, India then attacked an air force in Pakistan in response to a deadly suicide bombing in the Kashmir region.

The same unidentified researcher described this experiment as a "perfect nightmare."

The content included nationalist statements about India's airstrikes and graphic images, including of a man holding a beheaded man and describing Pakistanis and Muslims as "dogs" and "pigs."



"Facebook has systematically studied its overseas policies, and was well aware that weaker controls in non-English-speaking countries expose the platform to abuse by negative elements and authoritarian regimes," the Washington Post wrote in internal documents. To the United States, although less than 10% of the network's users in the world are Americans.

(Photo: Reuters)

A Facebook spokesman claimed that "we have invested significantly in technology to detect hate speech in a variety of languages, including Hindi and Bengali."

He said, "As a result, this year we reduced the amount of hate speech to which people are exposed by half. Today, it has dropped to 0.05%. This figure is a percentage of the content in all countries."

The company claimed that it was expanding its operations to new languages ​​spoken in India.

"Expressions of hatred against minorities, including Muslims, are rising around the world, so we are improving enforcement," a company spokesman said.

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Source: walla

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